Hicks' teeth clicked together. His hands moved across the table. They were thin and claw-like, and the nails scratched the boards. He said softly:
“Look out what you do.”
“What shall I do? I'm looking around for advice. Does it seem queer if I ask some of you?”
Hennion felt brutally master of the situation. There seemed something unfair in his greater size, his colder nerves and more untroubled brain, unfair to the little man opposite, with his hot impulses, his sad and sordid tragedy. Hennion felt so much at ease as to wonder why he did not feel more repulsion for Wood's murderer, and consoled himself by thinking Wood himself had been tolerant of hostilities and extremities, and would probably feel no repulsion for Hicks. Perhaps the key to Hicks was that he was created without tolerance. He was made up of intense convictions and repulsions and inflamed nerves. Whatever goal his purpose fixed on would become a white-hot point, blinding him to circumstances. And this focussing nature, which acted like a lens to contract general heat into a point of fire, was a natural phenomenon in dynamics. It seemed a characteristic of better service for starting a fire, and furnishing the first impulse of a social movement, than for running steady machinery. Some people claimed that society was running down and needed a new impulse. If so, it needed the Hicks type. If not, the trouble with Hicks might be that he was a phenomenon occurring at the wrong time, a fire that had to be put out.
“You ask me!”
“Then it does seem queer? But I ask it. Could a man be a party boss, and satisfy you?”
Hicks' gaze was now troubled and wild, as if he were trying to find the centre of the conception with his focus, and could not; as if the attempt to look at the conception with other than a set hostility was to break up the organisation of his mind. He drew back, his finger nails scratching across the table, and hid his face. Hennion rose.
“I beg your pardon.”
“You ask me!”
“Well, I don't think your method is the right one. If a clock's out of order, I don't think shooting into it is the right method. I dare say it expresses the way a man feels, but I don't see that it mends the clock. But if I were undertaking to mend it, and didn't know any too much about it, I might like to ask the man that was for shooting what his idea was. I told you I had a selfish thirst for knowledge. Under the circumstances, I beg your pardon.”